- audio player
- music (soft recordings)
- grow
- seed
MA Standards:
Language/L.PK.MA.6: Use words and phrases acquired through conversations, listening to books read aloud, activities, and play.
MA Draft Standards:
Life Sciences/From Molecules to Organisms: Inheritance and Variation of Traits/LS1/3.D: Recognize stages of the life cycle of plants and animals they have observed and discuss ideas about what happens at each stage. [Patterns, Change]
Head Start Outcomes:
Logic and Reasoning/Symbolic Representation: Represents people, places, or things through drawings, movement, and three-dimensional objects.
Logic and Reasoning/Symbolic Representation: Engages in pretend play and acts out roles.
PreK Learning Guidelines:
Science and Technology/Life Sciences 12: Observe and describe plants, insects, and animals as they go through predictable life cycles.
Play Together: Growing Seeds
© Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Early Education and Care (Jennifer Waddell photographer). All rights reserved.
STEM Key Concepts: Plants need water and light to grow; Plants have different parts: roots, stems, leaves, and fruit; Some parts of plants are below the ground and some above
ELA Focus Skills: Creative Movement, Gross Motor Skills, Speaking and Listening, Vocabulary
Play soft music and tell children they are going to pretend that they are seeds slowly growing into plants. Go over the stages of growth. Demonstrate for children how to move the way a plant would as it grows. For example, say,
- I am a tiny seed in the ground waiting to grow. (sit very still, curled up in a ball)
- The rain falls down. Then the sun comes out and warms the ground. (smile with a warm feeling of the sun)
- Slowly I begin to open. (uncurl a teeny bit)
- It rains again! Here comes the sun! I send my roots down into the ground. (move feet and legs)
- More rain. More sun. I push my sprouts against the soil. Push up, up, up through the ground. (raise fingers upward)
- The rain feels good. The warm sun feels good. Stretch up, up, up toward the sun. (stand up and stretch arms, hands, and fingers)
- Here comes a breeze. The wind feels good. Sway back and forth in the wind. (slowly move back and forth)
Repeat with children acting out the motions with you.
Take It Further: You may want to have two children act out the different types of weather while others act out growing. For example, for rain, wiggle fingers in a downward motion; for sun, open arms wide pointing to the sky; for wind, blow out and sway hands back and forth.
Adaptation: With very young children, do the movements with one child at a time. You may want to do fewer movements for the first time and add on as you repeat the activity.